Rational Rants

Mitch Ratcliffe blogs about the constantly changing boundary between media and life, the businesses that live on that border, and the meaning of all this change to society and the economy.

Mitch Ratcliffe

Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. He was editor of the ground-breaking Digital Media newsletter in the 1990s and a frequent contributor to ZDNet over the years. He led development of the first Web audio/video news network at ON24, sat on the board of Electric Classifieds Inc. and Match.com, and worked as an investment banker. A dedicated "portfolio career" worker, Mitch is co-founder and Chief Scientist of BuzzLogic LLC, a social network analytics and marketing communications platform developer, and works with Audible Inc. on its podcasting service, among other projects detailed <a href="http://www.ratcliffe.com/ disclosure.htm">here</a>.
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Latest Posts

Starbucks announced today it will begin a daily "Good Sheet" of news about politics, health care and other issues that it will distribute in its stores as a way to start conversations. According to a Starbucks executive quoted by The Motley Fool, the company is looking for "conversation starters.

I've been blogging for ZD Net for several years, writing for ZD publications for almost 20 years. I've always found readers to be intelligent and thoughtful, which is why I continue to do this while doing other things as "work.

Really fascinating news: Virus is passed from parent to child in the DNA. Researchers found that roseola, an infection that everyone apparently gets but only 20 percent of children develop the characteristic rash that gives it its name, is actually in our DNA.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, has offered a thoughtful but misguided palliative at CNN to the shortcomings of the age of networked democracy.... if you know how Americans use the Net to talk, you can easily stay in touch with real people.

Over the past couple weeks, I've been conducting polls about ebooks as I think about doing some publishing. The overwhelming response to the polls has been that there is not a sufficiently broad selection of books available in e-formats, regardless of what format, whether for Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader or in open formats, such as ePUB, an XML-based format.

Last week, I ran a poll about the number of ebooks people purchased each month. The results suggest that most people don't buy ebooks, but get them from various free sources, such as Project Gutenberg, Biblomania and O'Reilly Open Books.

Vint Cerf, one of the co-inventors of the underlying technology that makes the Web work, now Google's Internet evangelist, has issued a call for throughput-based pricing by ISPs. This in response to the Comcast ruling by the FCC, which ordered the cable carrier to stop interfering with certain kinds of traffic, including P2P application data.

I'm doing a bit of research on the question of ebooks and the appropriate formats to use in publishing some research and archival content I have. Do you have an Amazon Kindle, Sony Portable Reader or another favorite eBook format (Please add your comments on devices and formats in TalkBack)?

TeachStreet's launch of a Portland, Oregon, version of its teacher-student connection services has a lot to teach us about the evolution of Web services. The service, which lets students search for local teachers and teachers to offer classes to local and national student audiences, is where education is going: Toward increasingly customized one-on-one learning.

The news that Google is close to launching its own venture capital fund may raise a lot of hopes, but the history of corporate investment isn't fantastic and comes with a heavy price for portfolio companies that win a corporate sweepstakes. It also tells a lot about Google's own sense of its ability to innovate from the inside—that doesn't mean they don't think they can innovate, but that it may be more strategically advantageous to do it from the outside.

EyeJot's David Geller sent me an email that grabbed my attention the other day. In it, a video image of Geller told me about the company's new attachment features and he pointed below the video frame to an attached file.

I had a strange Twitter back-and-forth with "Amanda Chapel," the pseudonymous authors of a PR blog called "Strumpette," about the nature of the hacker ethic. I personally don't think the hacker ethic is very effective as a counterpoint to the system of intellectual property it decries, because hackers seem intent on getting rich one way or the other.

It's easy and fashionable to talk about "digital natives" that have grown up online, but the demographics of the United States are shifting radically to the grey and Web services developers should heed that news and make changes in their products and plans as a result. Old coots, like me, may hold the key to your future.